The skies are for all

As with the painters John Constable and Turner before him, Ruskin was familiar with the classification of cloud types by Luke Howard into cirrus, cumulus (or nimbus), and stratus. This system, further developed into ‘more minute distinctions’ by Robert FitzRoy, proposed a scientific structure to what had been seen as an elusive natural phenomena.

Ruskin furthered the idea of classification of cloud formation to sketch out overall structure using the principles of perspective.

Meteorology appealed to Ruskin as ‘a science of the pure air, and the bright heaven’ and he had been fascinated by clouds since childhood. He often painted cloud formations using a cyanometer, a device for measuring the colour blue, created by Horace Bénédict de Saussure.

Ruskin used meteorological imagery to counter his scientific adversaries and offered powerful critiques of the adverse effects of industrialisation. By 1870, in his essay The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century, Ruskin had become convinced that the sky was being dimmed by a ‘veil of pollution’ from industry. He concluded: 'that scientists would then be able to create within an experimental tube, a bit of more perfect sky than the sky itself’, anticipating the cloud chamber by 30 years.

Contemporary scientific views on the environment are becoming more aligned with Ruskin’s, which were ridiculed by his contemporaries as ‘imaginary or insane’. His essay The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century, outlining observations of changes in cloud properties and shifts in climate, is one of the earliest publications on climate change.

At the same time, he argued that, for all their theories and experimentation, scientists still ‘don’t know much yet about either about rock-beds, or cloud-beds’. For instance John Tyndall’s experiment on atmospheric scattering (or why the sky is blue) is satirised in Modern Painters and both Tyndall and Thomas Henry Huxley came under fire in The Queen of the Air.

Tyndall describes the action of the intense light upon the eye as follows: ‘As the sun's disk came more into view, its rays however still grazing the summit of the mountain, interference-spectra darted from it on all sides, and surrounded it with a glory of richly-coloured bars.’ In his own work, Ruskin discussed Tyndall’s theories that the blue of the sky is the result of light scattering by atmospheric particles favouring longer, bluer wavelengths refracted by light rather than water.